Sorry Bros, Bacon Is Murdering Your Manhood (According To This New Study)

A new study involving meat and your manhood has yielded some disturbing results for men of the world, like myself, who can’t live without bacon. On the flip side, if you’re one of those bros who eats grilled chicken 7 days a week then I have great news for you: your swimmies probably swim strong, strong like the salmon of Capistrano.

At the time of writing this I’ve currently got two separate packages of bacon sitting in my fridge, I’ve eaten bacon 4 of the 7 days this week, and plan on finishing out packages of (my favorite) Nueske’s Bacon and the bacon I recently tried for my first time (and might not get again since it cooks down so much) Vermont Smoke And Cure. I say this because I want you to KNOW FOR CERTAIN that I am a bacon lover, and I’m not here today to wage a war on bacon. In fact I’m all for sharing any and every study that paints bacon in a positive light, but this is not one of those studies. Now let’s get to the findings.

The study titled ‘Men’s meat intake and treatment outcomes among couples undergoing assisted reproduction’ was published in late June, and the findings suggest that the type of meat a man eats (processed vs. poultry) have a significant impact on the ability of his sperm to fertilize an egg.

Men in the ‘highest quartile of poultry intake’ had a 13% higher fertilization rate compared to the average (men in the lowest quartile of poultry intake were 35% less likely than average).

Conversely, when it came to IVF sperm fertilization of eggs the success of men who enjoyed diets high in processed meat (BACON) were 82%, 67%, 70%, and 54% (highest to lowest quartiles) when compared to average. Suggesting that a diet high in bacon led to sperm being less likely to fertilize an egg (under IVF conditions).

However, as is the case with any study correlation does not imply causation. As VICE’s Munchies notes, the reason poultry eaters may be seeing above normal success rates in IVF fertilization is because they just might be healthier human beings.

So what’s the takeaway here? If you want you sperm to swim strong then you should maybe try and eat more chicken, and maybe cut down on the amount of bacon you eat, but not necessarily because these findings only applied to IVF and not ICSI…